by Tim Powers
The dozen white dancers who appeared to be made out of clay had been high-stepping around in a solemn ring on the flat sand a hundred yards to the south when Dr. Armentrout and Long John Beach had originally walked up the beach to the Crane estate’s stairs, but now they were skipping and hand-clapping back this way. The dawn wind was cold, but Armentrout felt a drop of sweat roll down his ribs under his shirt as he scuffed down from the last cement step onto the sand.
“Keep walking,” Armentrout whispered to Long John Beach as he began plodding away north under the weight of the two-manikin appliance, “back to the stairway that’ll take us up to the Neptune Avenue parking lot, and don’t look back at those … those white people.”
The one-armed old man immediately turned to gape at the figures following, and his eyes and mouth were so wide that Armentrout turned around to look himself, fearing that the dancers might be silently running at them, perhaps armed with some of the smooth black stones that studded the marbled black-and-gray sand.
But the white figures, though closer, were just walking purposefully after Armentrout and Long John Beach now, and staring at them with eyes that seemed yellow and bloodshot against the crusted white faces. The clay plastered onto their swimsuit-clad bodies made them seem to be naked sexless creatures animated out of the wet cliffs.
Armentrout let go of the lever that controlled the manikins’ heads, in order to reach into his jacket pocket and grip the butt of the .45 derringer. The Styrofoam heads now nodded and rolled loosely with every jouncing step toward the cement pilings of the wooden municipal stairway that led up to the parking lot, and to the car, and away from this desolate shoreline.
But Long John Beach stopped and pointed back at the advancing mud-people. “No outrageous thing,” he cried, his voice flat and unechoing in the open air, “from vassal actors can be wiped away; then kings’ misdeeds cannot be hid in clay.”
For a moment Armentrout considered just leaving the crazy old man standing here, as a cast-off distraction to occupy the dancers while he himself trotted away to the car; but he knew now that he needed to find Koot Hoomie Parganas, and he would need every scrap of mask for that.
So Armentrout stopped too, and he turned to face the advancing animated statues; and with deliberate slowness he tugged the fist-sized gun free and let them see it. He gripped the ball-butt tightly, for he remembered that the little derringer tended to rotate in his hand when he pulled the hammer back against the tight spring, and now he cocked it with a crisp, ratcheting click.
“What business,” Armentrout said, “exactly, do you have with us?”
One of the figures, breastless and so probably a young man, stepped forward. “You took something,” came a high voice, “from up the stairs.”
“I did? What did I take?”
The figure’s blue eyes blinked. “You tell me.”
“Answer my question first. I asked you what exactly your business is here.”
The stony figures shuffled uneasily on the wet black-veined sand, and Armentrout suppressed a smile; for these were young people whose random propensities for music and dancing and the beach had happened to constitute a compelling resemblance to an older, mythic role in this season of insistent definition—but they were just San Diego County teenagers of the 1990s, and when they were challenged to explain their presence here, the archaic hum of the inarticulate purpose was lost beneath the grammar of reason.
“No law against dancing,” the figure said defensively.
“There is a law about concealed weapons,” another piped up.
The modern phrases had dispelled the mythic cast—they were now thoroughly just modern kids on a beach, with mud all over them.
“Scram,” said Armentrout.
The white figures began to amble away south with exaggerated nonchalance. Armentrout put the gun away and turned toward the stairs. A blue sign on the railing said,
WARNING
Stay Safe Distance
Away From Bluff Bottom
FREQUENT BLUFF FAILURE
Not today, Armentrout thought with satisfaction as he shooed Long John Beach ahead of him up the stairs.
In the parking lot between landscaped modern apartment buildings, Armentrout unstrapped the two-manikin appliance and stowed it in the back seat of his teal-blue BMW.
Then he opened the passenger-side door and pushed Long John Beach inside. “Belt up,” he said breathlessly to the old man.
“ ‘The purest treasure mortal times afford,’ ” the one-armed old man wailed, the strange and eerily flat voice echoing now between the white stucco walls, “ ‘is spotless reputation; that away, men are but gilded loam or painted clay.’ ”
“I said belt up,” hissed Armentrout between clenched teeth as he hurried around to the driver’s side and got in. “Anyway,” he added in shrill embarrassment as he started the engine, “there’s no hope anymore for our reputations in this town.”
As he drove back down Neptune Avenue, in the southbound lane this time, Armentrout could see a plywood sign attached to a pine tree beside the gates of the fieldstone wall on his right. Black plastic letters had been attached to it once, but weather or something had caused most of them to fall away; what remained was accidental Latin:
E T IN
ARC
ADIA
EGO
Et in Arcadia ego.
And I am in Arcadia, he thought, tentatively translating the words; or, I am in Arcadia, too; or, Even in Arcadia, I am.
Armentrout reflected uneasily that the word Arcadia—with its resonances of pastoral Greek poetry and balmy, quiet gardens—probably had applied to this place, before Our Miss Figleaf had come here and killed the king; but who was the Ego that was speaking?
Even when he had got back on the 5 Freeway, heading north through the misty morning-lit hills below the Santa Ana Mountains, Armentrout found himself still noticing and being bothered by signs on the shoulder. The frequent GAS-FOOD-LODGING 1 MI AHEAD signs had stark icons stenciled on them for the benefit of people who couldn’t read, and though the stylized images of a gas pump and a knife-and-plate-and-fork were plain enough, the dot-dash figure of a person on a long-H bed looked to him this morning disturbingly like a dead body laid out in state; and while he was still south of Oceanside he saw several postings of a sign warning illegal Mexican immigrants against trying to sprint across the freeway to bypass the border checkpoint—the diamond-shaped yellow sign showed a silhouetted man and woman and girl-child running hand-in-hand so full-tilt fast that the little girl’s feet were off the ground, and under the figures was the word PROHIBIDO. Armentrout thought it seemed to be a prohibition of all fugitive families.
And when he became aware that his heartbeat was accelerated, he recognized that he was responding with defiance, as if the signs were reproaches aimed at him personally. I didn’t kill any king, he thought; I haven’t uprooted any families. I’m a doctor, I—
Abruptly he remembered the voice of the obese suicide-girl as he had heard it over the telephone a few hours ago: Doctor? I walk all crooked now—where’s the rest of me?
But I certainly didn’t mean that to happen, he thought, her killing herself. I don’t give anyone a treatment I haven’t undergone and benefited from myself; and from my own experience I know that cutting the problem right out of the soul, rather than laboring to assimilate it, really does effect a cure. And even when these misfortunes do result—goddammit—aren’t I allowed some sustenance? I genuinely do a lot of good for people—is it wrong for me to sometimes take something besides money for my payment? Does this make me a, a sicko? He smiled confidently—Not … at … all. The whole notion of intrinsic consequences of “sin” is just infantile solipsism, anyway: imagining that in some sense you are everybody and everybody’s you. Guilt and shame are just the unproductive, negative opposites of self-esteem, and I feel healthily good about everything I do. That’s okay today.
Then he thought of what it was he now planned for his patient Janis Co
rdelia Plumtree, whenever he might catch up with her, and for Koot Hoomie Parganas, if the boy was still alive—and he heard again the flat howl that had burst from Long John Beach’s throat: gilded loam or painted clay.
It occurred to him, with unwelcome clarity, that the idealistic dancers on the beach had carried the rainbow of living flesh on the inside, and dry, cracked clay on the outside.
And so he was nearly driven to pull out his derringer and fire it at the sign on the tailgate of the sixteen-wheel trailer rig that cut him off near San Onofre, after Long John Beach pointed at the sign and said, “Hyuck hyuck—that’s addressed to you, Doc.” The sign read: INSIDE HEIGHT 10’—NOSE TO REAR 110’.
Armentrout’s forehead was suddenly chilly at the thought that his hand had actually brushed the derringer’s grip in his unthinking reflexive rage—but still!—“nose to rear”? How was he supposed to take that?
His cellular telephone buzzed, and he fumbled it up from between the seats and flipped open the cover. “Yes?” he said furiously after he had switched it on.
“Get your toes aft of the white line, please,” drawled a man’s humorous voice, “and sit your ass down in one of the seats! I’m in control of this bus, and you’re upsetting the children!”
In his first seconds of confusion Armentrout knew he recognized the voice, but he seemed to remember it as disembodied—a ghost?—and this was clearly not a ghost call. The voice and the background breeze-hiss were real, unlike the eternal clattering busy-ness of the group-projected ghost-bar.
“You was comin’ on to my daughter, man,” the voice said now; “you can’t blame me for having got a bit testy, now can you?” Before Armentrout could stammer out anything, the voice went on: “This is Omar Salvoy, and I can’t talk for long. Listen, you and I each got a gun pointed at the other, haven’t we? Mexican standoff. I think we can work together, both eat off the same plate. Here’s the thing—you’d like to get Koot Hoomie Parganas locked up in your clinic, wouldn’t you, in a coma and brain-dead, on perpetual life-support? Or haven’t you thought it through that far?”
It made Armentrout dizzy to hear this voice on the phone speaking his recent, somewhat shameful, thought aloud. “Y-yes,” he said, glancing sideways at Long John Beach and then in the rear-view mirror at the two placid Styrofoam heads. “What you describe is … it could, I guess you’ve figured out that it could, benefit you and me both. But not yet—it would have to be after he had been induced to, uh, officially … take the crown, if you know what I mean. I was just at the Fisher King’s castle, this morning, and it’s very evident from the look of things there that no new king has been consecrated yet. But after that’s occurred, I could set things up so that you and I could both benefit. As you know, I’m uniquely able to set up that scenario, just as you describe it.”
“Ipse dipshit. Now the girls have got some cockamamie idea about restoring the dead king, the old one, to life—I gotta monkeywrench that scheme, that guy is really old, he’s hardened in his thought-paths and likely to be resistant, not like the kid would be.”
“All ROM and no RAM,” agreed Armentrout, though he didn’t see how any of this would matter in a brain-dead body.
“Rom? Ram? Gypsies, sheep? Easy on the mystical, there, Doctor, I want you for science. You do know about how the spirit-transfer thing works, knocking a personality out of somebody’s head?”
“Uh.” Armentrout wiped his forehead and blinked sweat out of his eyes to be able to watch the freeway lanes. “Yes.” I wasn’t being mystical, he thought—doesn’t Salvoy know anything about computers? Oh well, give him the science. “The force that, that holds them in, works the opposite of forces like gravity and electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force, which all get weaker as the, the satellite, say, moves further away from the primary; ghost personalities are more strongly restrained, the further they get out, especially in sane people, but feel no clumping-together force at all if they stay within the mind’s confines. It’s much the same situation as is theorized for the quarks that make up subatomic particles—if they stay close together, they experience what’s called asymptotic freedom—”
“Speaking of which, I’m gonna have to pick up my ass and tote it out of here. I’m at a pay phone—we’ve stopped for gas in King City, and her boyfriend has just ducked off to visit the gents’ and pump the gas. You’d better get up here, right now; and then on to San Fran, apparently—this thing will go a lot smoother if we’ve got a real licensed psychiatrist along, for authority-figuring in case any locals should object to anything. Wave the stethoscope, flourish the prescription pad. I’ll make a point of getting out here again and calling you with more specific directions as we proceed, so take your telephone with you, you can do that, can’t you?”
“King City? San Francisco? Certainly, I’ve got the phone with me now. Obviously. But the P—the boy—he’s alive, I gather? Is he in San Francisco? We need—”
“He’s alive, and on his way there. Gotta go—stay by the phone.”
The line was dead, and Armentrout clicked the phone off, closed the cover, and wedged it carefully between the seat and the console. He would have to dig out of the trunk the phone-battery recharger that could be plugged into the cigarette lighter.
His lips were twitching in a brittle, almost frightened grin. There’s no reason why this shouldn’t work, he thought. When the king died eleven days ago, his death opened a temporary drain in the psychic floor locally, so that all my vengeful old California ghosts, at least, were sucked away, leaving me with their abandoned memories and strengths intact and harmless. I was fifty miles away, and my ghosts were banished! That drain has since closed up—but imagine if I could be in the same building with a flatline Fisher King! If we can get the new king on perpetual brain-dead life-support, the drain could be held propped open for … for decades. I’ll be able to outright terminate patients, consume their whole lives, without fear of being hassled by their outraged ghost personalities afterward. And Omar Salvoy will be able to—what? I suppose to evict all the girls from Plumtree’s head, so that he’ll have that youthful body all to himself, to live in.
It’ll be the best of both worlds, Armentrout thought, nodding and smiling twitchily. All the forgiveness that Dionysus’s pagadebiti wine offers, but with the profit from the sin retained intact too!
He glanced again at Long John Beach and the two heads in the backseat. I may be able to outright ditch the three of you in San Francisco, he thought.
Who were you calling?” asked Cochran, frowning.
They hadn’t found a Mobil station here in King City, and so they were using some of the Jenkins woman’s cash at this Shell station, and apparently the Torino’s tank hadn’t had room for a whole twenty’s worth of gas—Cochran was stuffing a couple of ones into the pocket of his corduroy bell-bottoms. He must have bought the cheapest gas.
Plumtree blinked at him around the aluminum cowl of the pay telephone. There was only a dial tone to be heard from the thoroughly warmed earpiece of the receiver she held in her hand. Cochran looked tired and bedraggled, she noted, in the cold morning sunlight, and she could see strands of white hair among the disordered brown locks tangled over his forehead.
“It was ringing,” she said, in the old reflexive dismissal of a patch of lost time. “Nobody on when I picked it up.” She reflected that this might be the literal truth; but she wasn’t happy to find herself reverting to the helpless shuck-and-jive evasions, the poker-table calls that were bluffs because she didn’t know what her hole cards were, so she went on spontaneously, “Let’s get breakfast now, there’s a Denny’s a block back—we can just have coffee with the others at the Cliff House place—and maybe a dessert, if they have some kind of sweetrolls there. And listen, if there’s a Sav-On or someplace open in this town, I’d like to buy some fresh underwear—these panties I’ve got on still say Tuesday on ’em—and Tiffany’s been wearing them.”
“… Okay.”
They got back into the beer-reeking warm
th of the car and drove around, but didn’t find any open store at all in the whole town, and so eventually she had to go into the ladies’ room in Denny’s, pull off her jeans, and wash the panties in the sink—with hand soap, wringing them halfway dry in a sheaf of paper towels after she’d rinsed them out—and then shiveringly pull them back on.
Now she was eating scrambled eggs and shifting uncomfortably on the vinyl booth seat, bleakly sure that the dampness must be visibly soaking through the seat of her jeans, and remembering reading On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in another restaurant booth eleven days ago. She had had the aluminum spear taped to her thigh during that breakfast, the points of it cutting her skin.
“I can’t ever sit comfortably in restaurants,” she complained. She remembered that a telephone had started ringing then, too, on that morning, right in the restaurant; it was Janis’s job to answer telephones, and Cody recalled flipping her lit cigarette into the open paperback book, intending to slam the cover firmly closed and extinguish the coal, since there had been no ashtray on the table and Janis didn’t smoke. But Janis had come on more quickly than usual, apparently, and hadn’t known about the lit Marlboro between the pages.
Cody grinned sourly now. Excu-u-se me!
At least my teeth don’t hurt much right now—not any worse than usual, anyway. And I certainly don’t have a nose-bleed! If Flibbertigibbet was on, it wasn’t for very long.
She looked up. Across the table, Cochran was smiling at her gently, out of his tired, red eyes. “Who were you calling?” he asked again.
Okay—perhaps the gas-station pay phone had not already been ringing when she had picked it up, and Cochran knew it. Okay. “I call time,” she said, “a lot. That’s UL3-1212 everywhere. In England they call it ‘the speaking clock,’ which always makes me picture Grandfather Clock, from the ‘Captain Kangaroo’ TV show, remember? Wake up, Grandfather! Even when I have a watch on. Those liquid-crystal displays, you can’t ever be—”
He was still smiling tiredly at her.
“I—” She exhaled and threw down her fork with a clatter. “Oh, fuck it. I don’t know, Sid. The receiver was warm, we must have been talking to somebody. My teeth are hurting, but we do call time a lot.”
